And now after this vision of wondrous beauty, this triumph of the grand arts of architecture and sculpture and landscape--of all the arts, fine and useful--has for six months enraptured the senses of people from all quarters of the globe, the learned men of the world have gathered here to set forth and discuss the fundamental principals that underlie the sciences, their correlations and the methods of their application to the arts of life--to summarize the progress of the past, to discuss the condition of the present and attempt, perhaps, a forecast of the future. In the scheme of classification, our subject appears in the last department that concerns itself with man's purely mundane affairs, and is the last section in that department. It thus appears properly as a climax and summary of the arts and sciences intelligible to man in his present stage of existence; and if the problem of the future life is ever solved this side of the grave, the knowledge conserved and disseminated by the library will be the starting-point and the inspiration of the advance, as it has been of all progress since the art of written speech was invented. "The library is the reservoir of the common social life of the race. It is at once the accumulator and the transmitter of social energy." Without the library the highest social culture is impossible; and a most moderate degree could be achieved by very few. Under the main division, "Social Culture," the library is one of the five sections in the Department of Education. In education are summed up all the achievements of the past and the possibilities of the future. In the words of Wendell Phillips, "Education is the one thing worthy the deep, controlling anxiety of the thoughtful man." "Education," exclaims Mazzini, "and my whole doctrine is included and summed up in this grand word." It is practically a truism that Jules Simon utters when he says "Le peuple qui a les meilleures écoles est le premier peuple; s'il ne l'est pas aujourd'hui il le sera demain."